Like for photography, every moment of time (the kshana) wombs a surprise, a sense of wonder. There was a moment when the young self-made photographer / filmmaker from a small village on one of Bengal’s Sunderbans Islands, surprised me (on Facebook) by dedicating a photograph to me. It was a kind of ‘gift to a teacher’ (gurudakshina) as he thought he was learning a lot from my Facebook posts and my reflections on matters physical and metaphysical. “Sky is the greatest cinema, watch it, rather than watching so many films which are mostly ‘information,” I had said once and he was finding some relief in my reflections. The lovely gift, announced publicly, was a photograph of the sky, the ākāsa, the undivided space or the abhed akasa. The Indian Darsana (Philosophy) perceives ākāsa as one of the five great elements (the panchamahabhuta) of the universe along with air, water, earth and fire.

Dark and deep, the image effused certain luminosity from within; and though still, I felt it was dynamic in movement underneath its surface. This was my instant and intuitive response to the image of the sky that Debraj Naiya had so generously dedicated to me. I have never met him but he was introduced to me by Lubdhak Chatterjee, a filmmaker friend from Kolkata. Debraj sent me some of his non-figurative (a term I borrow from fine art vocabulary for the abstract film) films that he made while confined to his home during the Covid19 prolonged lockdown period. They were interesting but what I found more engaging were his photographs and the way he had taken them, the kind of lenses that he uses and archives. It is his lensing philosophy (another term I normally use for the two Indian filmmakers, viz. Ritwik Ghatak and Mani Kaul, whose sense of the movie camera lens, to my mind, was so perceptive). Here is the ‘sky’ that Debraj had photographed in Kolkata through the ‘Kodascope 16’ lens which is nearly 100 years old by now:

The Lens

It is interesting the way he found the 1923 ‘Kodascope’ lens. A very rare lens, the ‘Kodascope 16’ was Eastman Kodak’s first 16mm film projector lens. Debraj modified this lens himself and has been trying to imaginatively use it. In his own words, “In 1923, Eastman Kodak (USA) built a 16mm projection lens named ‘Kodascope 16’; I found it in a Kolkata street, thinking it was a microscopic lens. But after adapting, I saw that this lens was giving an immensely soft image. I fitted a three-colored filter at the back of the lens, omitting its glass element. While going to camera sensor through the lens, light rays were making a flare like rainbow and creating an illusion in imaging.”

I think this adds a mystical element to the image of the sky that was captured around dusk time in a Kolkata suburb. Maybe it carried some of his childhood images of the sky he had seen from a small island-village called Moipith on the Sunderbans, where he was born and brought up in 1989. To me, any photographic image carries with it a bunch of memories; a sort of muted biographies.

Here is that lens:

Biography: The Sunderbans, the Skies, the Life and its Trajectories

What attracted me towards Debraj Naiya’s art of photography was the trajectory of his own struggling life, shaping, on the way, his worldview and the ways of seeing and attaining levels of the ‘Rigour of Austerity’ (a concept forming one of the pillars of my own theory of Cinema of Prayoga). Amidst people on that small island of Moipith on the Sunderbans, he considered himself a bit more privileged because his father was a high school teacher. Physically weak in childhood, he was left alone on open grounds most of the time and that pushed him in close contact with ‘solitude’. After his 10 th standard, he had to move away (130km) from his native village to complete his higher secondary education and then he came to Kolkata in 2008, where he joined a theatre group, while pursuing his studies at the same time. He failed in his graduation exams, and that spelled ‘abandonment’ by his father and friends, everyone stopped talking to him. At the same time, he had to experience the toxic behavior of his colleagues at the group theatre. He left it but continued acting discretely till 2015. Not finding a suitable job, he became a coolie, a laborer, to eke out a living on his own. After working all day long, he would do theatre at night, would also visit art galleries whenever there was chance.

Coolie to Chance to Camera

The deep commitment and determination paid; he became a primary school teacher and Kolkata and by and by, he went on gathering a fairly good collection of lenses and even turned fungus into an imaginative fine art. Let us have a quick look at some of the lenses from his collection:

Of the 22 lenses that he has collected through his struggling times and with almost no resources, one was built approximately between 1840 and 1850. Since the lens has no label on it or no specific details inscribed, e.g. who, where and when, his guestimate about it is based on its structural mechanism. Here it is:

This lens, as Debraj tells me, was built for wooden box cameras. It used to have the aperture disk but in the lens he had found somewhere in Kolkata did not have it. Its maker John Henry Dallimeyer (1830-1883) was an Anglo-German optician, who turned from astronomical work to the design and making of photographic lenses, he introduced improvements in both portrait and landscape lenses, in object-glasses for the microscope and in condensers for the optical lantern.

Other than these lenses, Debraj has various Russian, German and Japanese modern camera and projection lenses including Bell & Howell, Carl Zeiss, Ernst Letiz GmbH, Wetzlar, etc. Interestingly, he has no camera of his own; the camera he uses belongs to his brother. The Nikon3300’s sensor has caught fungus but, as I mentioned before, he has been turning the obstacle into an advantage. He has no adequate accessories to attach lenses as enquired, but he would find ingenious ways to fix some odd hardware available in a neighborhood shop.

Handmade Lens

Debraj has attempted to make a pinhole lens with a body cap, which allows a little amount of light on to the camera sensor, producing unusual images. Though, the pinhole itself is an old technique and has been used for creative purposes by photographers across the world though small in number, the process that led Debraj to build the lens on his own is a bit different. Once he was trying to prepare a script for a film on a blind artist, and was studying and researching on the blind ‘vision’ phenomenon. Interestingly, the Indian Darsana would call the blind person Prajnachakshu or the one who sees with the eye of wisdom (Opening the inward eye, Amrit Gangar, The Speaking Tree, The Times of India, 10 October 1998). This would also remind us of the great Santiniketan Prajnachakshu artist Benode Behari Mukherjee and the short film Satyajit Ray had made on him, titled The Inner Eye. The photographic camera finds its ‘inner eye’ through the lens-wo/man who captures a visible outer reality through it.

Towards his research and filming quest, Debraj started reading and watching interviews of different people who were blind and he also personally met with a few blind people. It was this process that led him to build the lens himself which could show the ‘prajnachakshu perspective’ mixed with his own imagination.

Let us have a look at some of the images that he has captured employing the handmade lens:

The boy from the little island-village of Moipith on the Sunderbans Islands in West Bengal now teaches in a primary school in Kolkata and spends his spare time on gathering and gauging lenses, finding fixtures in hardware shops and fixing eye on the city’s streets and flea markets, finding function for the fungus, and gazing the sky in search of an infinite uncloven space…

Amrit Gangar

Mumbai-based film theorist, curator, historian and writer

He has been a Consultant Curator to the National Museum of Indian Cinema and has been felicitated / awarded by several organizations for his work, including the International Federation of Cine Clubs, the Cinematographers’ Combine, the Gujarat Sahitya Akademi. He has presented his theory of Cinema of Prayoga at various national and international venues including the Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan; the Pompidous Centre, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; the Lodz Film School, Poland, the Danish Film School, Copenhagen, etc. He has been a curator (film programs) for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Kala Ghoda Artfest; MIFF, etc. Recently he edited and published Migrant Workers Discourse which is possibly the first eBook in the world, emerging from his Facebook posts and dialogues.